Are online festival editions completely unable to reproduce the community feel that analog festivals can create? This article sets out to challenge the simple binary of the analog versus the digital. Online viewing tends to be framed as an individual, solitary activity in contrast to the collective experience of watching a film offline in the cinema. Questioning the binary opposition often constructed between online and offline viewing, this article presents two best practice examples illustrating how a sense of community can be achieved while streaming films online. These two examples of communal viewing experiences in online formats, which I have been following during lockdown, are Carol Morley’s Friday Film Club and the event ‘Come Together’, arranged by the Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images. Despite not being part of the film festival circuit, these cases provide best practice examples for film festival programming.
A conversation with B. Ruby Rich, one of the most prolific film critics in the world. For decades she has been involved in film culture as a curator, film critic, professor, and journal editor. In this interview, Skadi Loist and Dagmar Brunow talk with Rich about her inspirations, her international encounters, and her take on film culture and criticism. Above all, this conversation highlights the importance of looking at the social relations that make film culture happen.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022. Everyone in the country experienced this and the afterward moments in their own way. All of us have learned what the shock of invasion is, mobilisation and how to resist it, and the steps to be followed during a bombing. We all had to take care of close ones, help strangers, evacuate, and volunteer with transfers, food, and medicine. All these experiences appear in various forms: taking pictures, noting reflections, discussing our feelings and emotions with others, following the news, warfare updates, and air raid alerts. The situation was so dynamic and those experiences were so ephemeral that as academics we found it important to capture the moment. We have developed our capacity and expertise to document such experience as historical and/or legal evidence, but also as a way to withstand the invasion.
See more: https://www.lvivcenter.org/en/updates/documenting-the-war-2/
This is a documentation of an online conversation organised by NECSUS on 9 March 2022 on the occasion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started the previous month. How do heritage organisations in Ukraine experience this moment of crisis? Archivists and scholars from the Center of Urban History in Lviv speak with Dagmar Brunow (Linnaeus University), leader of the NECS workgroup Cultural Memory and Media.